Skate
Silhouettes become me.
I have no affinity for harsh lighting
I prefer the way shadows distort time, how ocean waves
stretch bodies like duppies
bowing out of this world and the next
even when the moon hits blue-black just right
salt slips from sleek backs, returns to a collective seawater;
homeostasis. I wanted to dissolve into dark like that
home in the mouth of Yemaya
I glide over her tongue & tuck my bell bottoms so they don’t get caught
in infinite wheels. A mermaid’s tale—
I became an animal transported by myth
the first time at the roller rink felt like school, every gathering a chance to
feed ancient rhythms sunk to ocean floor
Polished wood anointed with sweat, self-guided ablutions
I recalled what it meant to be free & glistening
more bend than bone
More inlet than isolation, saddling the curved dark of purple bodies
gliding to the sound of their own music,
technologies of survival scattered across sand
Dawn’s light breaks our midnight shuffle
like cops cutting through a crowd. Cartilaginous creatures wash up on shore,
beaten by waves, they refuge in the tide pools of my chest
I too find myself gasping for breath, for return
This could be burial, a collapse of lungs deflating the ego
haint blue of our veins warding off unwanted predators
What God could ignore this?
Your hands around my waist guiding migration to warmer waters
Where grief & gratitude burn at the far end of a backwood
Let the open womb of the sea reclaim us
Let us make portals out of gills
an accumulation of harms
at the end of the world is an eviction notice. while dust gathered on the
bumblebees’ backs, Uncle Sam was getting rich pushing pesticides out his mean
cavity, wide mouth swallowing even the simplest crumbs of concrete. though
dendrites were sliced to stubs, roots wilted under poison’s heat, memory sprung
eternal. we knew the smoke warning and shelter in place abandonment signaled future
firestorms to be withstood. we found we had more in common with the trash filled gully,
the stray cat hunting mice in the alley; an invasive species outcompeting, an honorific
worth suffering for. the disaster itself was, by all accounts, quite ordinary, yet
immutable. the drag queens & banished Blacks warned us first of impending erasure, cops
julienned our every resistance: sequined skin in the sink congested gluttonous drains in a
kitchen of horrors, blackened lung & government apologies wore heavy on cheaply erected lies.
self-deputized saviors sprayed RAID against an army of insurgents cuz we don’t die, we
multiply. in the wake of catastrophe, dread became dormant among all that white
noise, colonizing sound, our rebellion hibernating under the sixth mass extinction, mother earth’s
open wounds stuffed with unexpressed passion as we lamented bearing witness to collapse in our
prime. my friends bemoaned that all the poets are writing about the end of the world as if these
quotidian lives aren’t filled with small apocalypses, as if rejecting a disappearing act isn’t its own
riot. the observers wondered why we didn’t leave, but where was there to go? this hell was home,
scarred. we weathered waters before this flood. in America, toughness can easily be mistaken for
tenderness, the meat of you pulverized either way. to say that we lived through it would be an
understatement. ancestors were ahead of the game: their fugitivity reminding us that nothing is
vestigial. capitalism and collapse, dirty water and dirty souls, cruelty unfurling, plain as another
Wednesday afternoon. later, our televisions told us it wasn’t a crime, it was a necessary evil,
xenobiotic substances tested our able to endure toxicity, all that waiting rusted the edges of our
youth: an unwelcomed baptism, a painful ablution. at the perforated border of this sacrifice
zone, years later, a lone anthropologist pens: here was the site of an extermination.
